The Internet Is Really Really

Good....

Magnet, S. 2007. Feminist Sexualities, Race and the Internet: An Investigation of

suicidegirls.com. New Media and Society, 9(4):557-602

•This paper looks at Suicide Girls

•Alt-porn via visual discourse analysis

• Feminist ideology in online spaces

Overview

SuicideGirls.com• Started in 2001, with the

aim of ‘challenging social mores of beauty’

• Models apply; popularity in the suicidegirls community = success

• Subscription is $12 a month, the more you pay, the more you get

Subculture/Alt-porn

•No 'sex by numbers'; defined by lifestyle

•Blur binary of commerce vs community

•New aesthetics

Today’s Lecture• Looking at Magnet’s research, we

will:

• Identify the theoretical context

• Explore the use and application of visual discourse analysis

• Examine the analysis e.g. in relation to race and gender

Outcomes• By the end of today’s lecture, you should be

able to:

• Define the theoretical and methodological approaches developed in this paper;

• Show an understanding of the application of visual discourse analysis;

• Appreciate the way the internet is gendered and racialised.

Context

Cyber-Sex•Opens up a new area of media studies

•Changes our assumptions about what sex is:

• Involves penetration

•‘Coming together’ of two bodies

•Means being in the same room!

Cyber-feminism & Wired Women

‘we are the virus of the new world disorder/ rupturing the symbolic from within/ saboteurs of big daddy mainframe/ the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix’

Haraway’s (1991) Cyborg Manifesto: ‘I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess’

Challenge to traditional feminisms

Embraced cyberspace as somewhere gender can be experienced differently

Is SuicideGirls Feminist?

• Sites like suicidegirls and alt-porn in general seem at first glance to offer new ways for women to articulate sexuality:

• Represent both mind and body

• Alternatives to mainstream

• Safer than heterosexual sex

• But new forms of exclusions: “Give a few lucky women computers to play with and they’ll shut up and stop complaining” (Wilding, 1998 p.10)

Methods

Analysing Representation

• Analysing representation is the act of recognising that images are actively constructed and understanding the way representation structures our world

• ‘The vision machine’ - visual culture is omnipresent (Virilio 1994)

• ‘Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice’ (Haraway 1991; 189)

Discourse Analysis• Doing a visual discourse analysis means asking:

• Social construction - how is the image put together?

• Discourses - sets of meaning and wider significance?

• Historical traces - what histories have allowed the image to exist?

Ethics Online• There are still no definitive codes surrounding online

research, only guidelines!

• AOIR asks the following questions:

• If access to an online context is publicly available, do members/participants/authors perceive the context to be public? What considerations might be necessary to accommodate ‘perceived privacy‘ or the notion that individuals might care more about the appropriate flow of information as defining it as public or private?

Ethics Online

‘All the documents cited are public documents...’

Reason to believe that people may think their engagement on suicidegirls is private - and in many cases their words are protected by a paywall

Analysis

Objectification & Grotesque

• Objectification - using the female body as an instrument (usually sexual)

• Suicide Girls partly reverses this objectification through notions of ‘voice’ and through masculine bodily practices e.g. punk subculture

• Female grotesque, body that ‘protrudes, bulges, sprouts and branches off’ (Bakhtin 1965 p.320)

Constructs of Privilege

• Bodies defined by range of binary differences;

• Intersectionality; bodies are more than just gender, race, class, sexuality, but all of these things;

• White, straight, male = easiest difficulty setting!

• You're absolutely, GORGEOUS. This set needs to be bought ASAP! Love the exotic look <3

• Add in an urban tribal feel , with feathers and exotic jewelry to complete this set

Visual Discourse AnalysisWith the person sat next

to you, discuss:

Social construction - how is the image put

together?

Discourses - what sets of meaning are drawn on

and what are their wider significance?

Historical traces - what histories have allowed the

image to exist?

(5mins)

•You're absolutely, GORGEOUS. This set needs to be bought ASAP! Love the exotic look <3

•Add in an urban tribal feel , with feathers and exotic jewelry to complete this set

Commodifying Difference

•Does offer a different representation of female sexuality and beauty

•Commodification of feminism - markets itself on its feminist and subversive credentials; profits from feminist discourse

•And still privilege binary of white/black

Summary• Looking at Magnet’s research, we

have:

• Identified the theoretical context

• Explored the use and application of visual discourse analysis

• Examined the analysis e.g. in relation to race and gender

Outcomes• By now, you should be able to:

• Define the theoretical and methodological approaches developed in this paper;

• Show an understanding of the application of visual discourse analysis;

• Appreciate the way the internet is gendered and racialised.